Shared Hosting vs Managed Hosting: Basic Differences

Before I get into some specific recommendations for when you should choose shared hosting vs managed WordPress hosting, I think it’s important to give you an introduction to these two types of hosting.

How Shared Hosting Works

With shared hosting, you “share” a web server with tons of other webmasters. Depending on where you host your site, you might share server resources with hundreds of other accounts.

This has both pros and cons…

By utilizing this shared approach, hosts are able to keep their costs down and offer you very cheap prices.

The disadvantage, though, is that your site doesn’t have dedicated resources. So if a host puts too many accounts on a server, and those accounts experience a usage-spike, your site might slow down…even if it’s just other people’s sites experiencing issues.

Good shared hosts will try to mitigate this by adding some isolation and limiting the number of hosting accounts on a server, but not all shared hosts do a good job there.

How Managed WordPress Hosting Works

Managed WordPress hosting is a set of WordPress-specific services and optimizations that are added to a regular hosting plan.

You can find managed WordPress hosting for all types of hosting, including shared hosting. Yes, it’s possible to find hosting that’s both managed and shared (WP Engine’s cheapest plans are a good example of this):

Even if a managed WordPress host uses a shared hosting environment, they’re usually much less likely to overload their servers, so the negative performance aspect from above doesn’t apply.

Until your blog starts receiving higher traffic and making money, there’s just not a huge benefit to paying more money for managed WordPress hosting.

Are There Downsides To Shared Hosting?

Yes – I already mentioned the main downside:

Performance when getting higher traffic.

While most shared hosting can still load pretty quickly when your site only has a small number of visitors, that will change once your site gets popular and has more content.

On high-traffic sites, shared hosting usually just can’t keep up with the load and your site’s performance will suffer.

Additionally, some budget shared hosts offer low-quality support because of cutting costs and accepting too many clients. You can definitely find shared hosts with great support, though – but there are only exceptional in this category of web-hosting.

Finally, while your host might help a little bit, you’ll have to take on more responsibility for things like:

Performance optimizations mean your site will load quickly without any manual effort. For example, most managed WordPress hosts have already implemented caching, so you don’t need to worry about configuring a caching plugin.

Additionally, if you ever do run into any issues, you can get help from a team of WordPress experts.

Moreover, in my experience of moving ShoutMeLoud from Shared to VPS and now finally to managed WordPress hosting, it saves a lot of time and headache of maintaining a server.

Are There Downsides To Managed WordPress Hosting?

Well, as you’d expect, the main downside is that, to get all those convenient features, you’re going to pay a higher price.

If you’re on a budget, you can find free plugins that can get you kind of close to the convenience of a managed WordPress host without that higher price tag.

A blog scientist by the mind and a passionate blogger by heart ❤️. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud (Award winning blog), speaker at various international forums.Life motto: Live while you can! Teach & inspire while you could & Smile while you have the teeth.

Hello Harsh, I like to add one point. The majority of us don’t go for Managed WordPress Hosting because of the hefty price. That does include me until I realized the real potential of MWH. But if you plan to enroll during festive season i.e. when you get massive discounts, the price for Managed WordPress Hosting does fall under your budget. This not only makes your quest feasible but reasonable too.

This is too informative post for new bloggers. I didn’t even though about the difference between Shared and Managed. After reading this article now I came the know the difference between shared and managed. Recently I am using Bluehost shared hosting, But I am thinking to move my blog to Kinsra. What’s your opinion, let me know 🙂

Hey Harsh Excellent article. No doubt that shared hosting is an ideal solution for small level businesses or for testing out any new idea. However, the most common issue found during speed optimization is using a low quality server resources which undermines other marketing efforts. I was amazed to see that Cloudways didn’t make in this list as they are among the few providers that ease end-user experience by looking after every little technical aspects. Anyways thanks a lot for sharing.

Bluehost is indeed very good option for shared hosting for beginners. As site gets more popular A2Hosting is recommended. It has been getting a lot of love recently but disadvantage for Indian audience is they charge a very high 18% GST which Bluehost does not charge so better to stick to Bluehost as long as you can. Other option is to move to Amazon Web Services but it would be very expensive for a beginner.